[links] Link salad rolls into hump day

Man behind bars 2 years after judge orders release — Daniel Larsen was found ‘actually innocent’ of carrying a concealed knife, but the attorney general’s appeal is keeping him in prison, claiming that he missed a key deadline. Feel safer now? What if this was you trapped in prison because someone else missed a paperwork deadline? Tough on crime makes for a great campaign soundbite, but the nuances ruin people’s lives. Too bad half the American voting population doesn’t do nuance.

Todd Akin’s comment brings ‘war on women’ back to prominence — At least until Election Day, Republicans were supposed to pretend that their party’s alleged “war on women” was nothing but a paranoid fantasy stoked by desperate Democrats. Obviously, Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) didn’t get the memo. Yep. This. Which is why I’m quite surprised by all the crocodile tears from the GOP over Akin simply stating what the party has been pushing for years.

Are ‘Swift Boat’ attacks on Obama bogus? — By definition. ‘Swift Boat’ attacks are knowing lies and character assassination. Imagining them to be genuine is like imagining the Tea Party to be a politically independent, grass roots movement.

In Praise of Fact-Checkers — Ta-Nehisi Coates on Newsweek and Niall Ferguson’s blatant dishonesty there. Oddly enough, Ferguson was arguing a conservative perspective when he lied in Your Liberal Media. This is why Sarah Palin’s “Real Americans” vote Republican: because of the lack of ethics among liberals.

The convenient untruth of GOP lies on abortion, climate change, tax cuts, and vote fraud — Common wisdom on the left is that Mitt Romney has decided to lie his way to the Presidency. But there is another explanation, one that is much worse: Romney may actually think he is telling the truth. Ideologues don’t live in the same world as the rest of us. If the facts don’t fit the ideology, then the problem must be with the facts, as the ideology can never ever be wrong. This is precisely what lies behind the wholesale conservative rejection of the reality-based community. Thirty years of cynically deliberate cultivation of counterfactuals in pursuit of the loyalty of the GOP base has produced a culture of anti-intellectualism that will someday be seen as breathtakingly dangerous and wrong-headed in historical terms.